Managing for species using current weather patterns fails to incorporate the uncertainty associated with future climatic conditions; without incorporating potential changes in climate into conservation strategies, management and conservation efforts may fall short or waste valuable resources. Understanding the effects of climate change on species in the Great Plains of...
Phenology is an integrative science that comprises the study of recurring biological activities or events. In an era of rapidly changing climate, the relationship between the timing of those events and environmental cues such as temperature, snowmelt, water availability, or day length are of particular interest. This article provides an...
Plants are constantly exposed to a large and diverse array of microbes; however, most plants are immune to the majority of potential invaders and susceptible to only a small subset of pathogens. The cytoskeleton comprises a dynamic intracellular framework that responds rapidly to biotic stresses and supports numerous fundamental cellular...
RNA-Sequencing (RNA-Seq) has been widely adopted for quantifying gene expression changes in comparative transcriptome analysis. For detecting differentially expressed genes, a variety of statistical methods based on the negative binomial (NB) distribution have been proposed. These methods differ in the ways they handle the NB nuisance parameters (i.e., the dispersion...
Gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) are increasingly used in biomedical applications, hence understanding the processes that affect their biocompatibility and stability are of significant interest. In this study, we assessed the stability of peptide-capped AuNPs and used the embryonic zebrafish (Danio rerio) as a vertebrate system to investigate the impact of synthesis...
Previous game-theoretic studies of vaccination behavior typically have often assumed that populations are homogeneously mixed and that individuals are fully rational. In reality, there is heterogeneity in the number of contacts per individual, and individuals tend to imitate others who appear to have adopted successful strategies. Here, we use network-based...
The ascomycete fungus Tolypocladium inflatum, a pathogen of beetle larvae, is best known as the producer of the immunosuppressant drug cyclosporin. The draft genome of T. inflatum strain NRRL 8044 (ATCC 34921), the isolate from which cyclosporin was first isolated, is presented along with comparative analyses of the biosynthesis of...
Fungi are a large group of eukaryotes found in nearly all ecosystems. More than 250 fungal genomes have already been sequenced, greatly improving our understanding of fungal evolution, physiology, and development. However, for the Pezizomycetes, an early-diverging lineage of filamentous ascomycetes, there is so far only one genome available, namely...
The cereal pathogen Fusarium graminearum produces secondary metabolites toxic to humans and animals, yet coordinated transcriptional regulation of gene clusters remains largely a mystery. By chromatin immunoprecipitation and high-throughput DNA sequencing (ChIP-seq) we found that regions with secondary metabolite clusters are enriched for trimethylated histone H3 lysine 27 (H3K27me3), a...
Endogenous small interfering RNAs (siRNAs) are a class of naturally occuring regulatory RNAs found in fungi, plants, and animals. Some endogenous siRNAs are required to silence transposons or function in chromosome segregation; however, the specific roles of most endogenous siRNAs are unclear. The helicase gene eri-6/7 was identified in the...